YouTube Vs Facebook Video View Criteria? 30 vs 3 Sec?

It can get extremely confusing when it comes to decide between your ultimate video hosting platform. It's the battle between You...

It can get extremely confusing when it comes to decide between your ultimate video hosting platform. It's the battle between YouTube and Facebook. When I started making AskHassam episodes, it was a very tough decision to whether upload my videos to YouTube, Facebook or other relatively smaller websites like Daily Motion or Vimeo etc.

Looking forward to this, I made a short video sharing my thoughts on the issue.

Then finally, I settled with YouTube for some reasons and I'll share that with you brothers and sisters in a bit. First, lets go through how Facebook and YouTube determines their 'video view'.

YouTube Video View

So each time when a person clicks on a YouTube video, may that be on YouTube it's self or via any embed video in third party blogs/websites, YouTube video player starts counting the seconds the guy has watched the video.

Once he watches the video upto 30 seconds, that gets counted as a video view and the stats for that particular video get updated.

Facebook Video View

Though with Facebook, it's quite different. First of all, Facebook plays all the videos in a timeline automatically. Many doubt whether a person was actually interested in the video or not, even though the counter for views got incremented.

Secondly, Facebook counts a video view just after the second mark! This is 10 times less than what YouTube believes the criteria should be.

My Personal Take

It's important to understand is why video views actually matter. The more the video views, the more attention a video gets. As it's thought to be.

Do you think that 3 second duration actually portrays a person watching a video that might be a 10 min log if not more? Not that 30 seconds does, BUT it still displays that the user tried watching the video and loosed his interest on the way.

With Facebook, more video views obviously attracts advertisers and gives confidence to the publishers and video makers.

There are few doubts about the credibility of the video views on Facebook? A video playing automatically, and for just 3 seconds get's counted as a video view. Does that show that the viewer actually had interest in the video? Will the video convert well?

Imagine you have 10,000 video views on Facebook and most of them were auto plays on time lines. This means, that you get near to no conversion for your goal. With conversion, I mean with every video, you could related an aim. Some marketers like to take traffic to their websites via Facebook videos.

They could either ask the viewers to follow them on other social media profiles. Or they could ask them to subscribe to their newsletter. Or just buy a product!

The Point

The point is, that videos on YouTube have a bit more edge for 2 reasons,

1- The user intentionally clicks on the video that he/she feels interesting. This could bump up the conversion rates.

2- The videos with more views on YouTube actually shows that people watched the videos for sure! Unlike on Facebook where an auto play. 3 seconds attention span is fairly less!.

3- For people who post more of searchable content, they could go for YouTube as it's still a better video search engine. People hardly search for videos on Facebook as of yet. But for viral video creators who rely on social shares, I think Facebook is a pretty good choice for them.

My Decision

Looking forward to this, as I create more informative AskHassam videos that feature your questions mostly, these could be search on YouTube by tons of other people. SO looking forward to this I decided to stick with YouTube even though YouTube is banned in Pakistan by the authorities.

What do you think?

Let me know what you think about this? Is Facebook's criteria of 3 seconds video view okeh? How could one justify a view in your opinion?